India"s Al Qaeda

The brazen strikes and its expanding agenda make the Pakistan-backed terror group a deadly foe for India, and now, the world.

advertisement

Sandeep Unnithan

RAMESH VINAYAK

December 11, 2008

ISSUE DATE: December 22, 2008

UPDATED: December 21, 2008 13:11 IST

It was an attack that shocked the world for its sheer scale and ruthlessness. The Mumbai mayhem, the first seaborne urban terror assault in over three decades, was carried out by an organisation that is as unpredictable as it is ingenious.

It is also the perfect example of a Janus-faced terror outfit—the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) or the ‘army of the pure’—which also camouflages itself as a benign welfare organisation. Indeed, the Jamaatud-Dawa (JuD), a moniker which it adopted after being banned by the US in 2001, calls itself ‘an Islamic relief and welfare organisation striving to provide humanitarian assistance to people in need’. The Lashkar-e-Toiba headquarters at Muridke, 40 km from Lahore, resembles a sprawling Islamic university with schools and libraries.

The mastermind of 26/11, Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi

Today, thanks to the confession of Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, the 21-yearold terrorist captured alive in Mumbai, security agencies have a detailed account of the military-style planning that went into the LeT’s Mumbai operation, and can see through the JuD as an elaborate facade.

“The Lashkar is a military arm of the ISI with an India-specific agenda,” says a senior intelligence official. In a mission statement titled ‘Why we are waging jihad’, the LeT urges the dismemberment of India. Indeed, many would argue that it typifies Pakistan’s policy towards India. Kasab told the Mumbai police that the attacks were directly supervised by the Lashkar’s operations chief Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi aka ‘chachaji’ and Abu Muzammil who controls the group’s operations in the Indian hinterland.

The 10-member Mumbai terror squad was part of a group of 32 who were present for training—16 were selected for an as yet unknown clandestine operation by Rahman. Thirteen others, including Kasab, were sent to Muridke where they were taught swimming and acquainted with the life of a fisherman at sea.

It is unlikely that the recruits were told why they were being taken out there in motor launches and familiarised with the marine environment— the LeT has a policy of never revealing how operatives are finally inserted into the area of attack. Lakhvi spent three months in Karachi, personally seeing off the squad as they set sail on November 23 after postponing their earlier September 27 departure.

The bulk of the coordination for the attack was done from the LeT’s operational headquarters called Baitul Mujahideen located far from the public eye at Shawai Nala, a small town on the outskirts of Muzaffarabad, the capital of PoK. These headquarters located at the sylvan foothills of the Himalayas, comprising a threestoreyed building, masjid, hostels and an arms and ammunition storehouse, is where investigators believe the Mumbai mayhem was most likely hatched.

The Lashkar brass, including its ‘Amir’ Saeed, who live in ISI safehouses in various cities around Pakistan and travel in heavily armed cavalcades of SUVs which would make Indian politicians blush, kept in constant touch with each other through Thuraya satellite phones. Rahman was constantly in touch with their cadres through VOIP cell phones even as they were engaged in ferocious gunbattles with security personnel in Mumbai.

Over the years there has been increasing evidence that the LeT may be aspiring for a global profile. “LeT is a dangerous al-Qaeda affiliate that has demonstrated its willingness to murder innocent civilians,” said Stuart Levey, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence said, rather prophetically in May this year.

“LeT’s transnational nature makes it crucial for governments worldwide to do all they can to stifle its fundraising and operations,” he adds. Just six months later, Lashkar terrorists had massacred 163 civilians, including six Americans, in Mumbai.

The LeT was founded in 1986 as the Markazul-Dawa wal Irshad by Prof Hafiz Mohammed Saeed of the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore to train fighters for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In a few years, they had switched focus to Jammu and Kashmir, quickly supplanting most other militant groups like the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and becoming an in-house terror group of the ISI.

“So enmeshed is the LeT with the Pakistan army establishment that its activists are known as ‘sarkari mujahid’ within Pakistan,” says a top intelligence official.

Unlike the Jaish-e-Mohammad, floated by Maulana Masood Azhar, one of three terrorists released in exchange for the IC-814 hostages, LeT has few linkages with Al Qaeda, a crucial factor which made the US look the other way all these years despite Lashkar being on its watch since 9/11.

“Despite LeT’s glaring linkages with the ISI, the US never pressed Pakistan to dismantle the outfit because it was never seen to be hurting the American interests until the Mumbai attack,” says former army chief General V.P. Malik. Post Kargil, the LeT boosted flagging militancy in J&K with a series of suicide attacks, pushing in fighters from countries as diverse as Sudan and Jordan.

Kasab’s Confessions

He was one of 32 trainees selected by Lakhvi who divided the 10-member team into five groups of two men each

Kasab and the team leader Ismail were codenamed the VTS team. They were shown targets on Google Earth and given information about how and where to get down in Mumbai.

His team was instructed to fire at rush hour between 7 and 11 a.m., and 7 and 11 p.m.

The operation was fixed for September 27 but later postponed. The 10 members stayed in Karachi and practised sailing using inflatable speed boats

Each member was given a rucksack containing eight grenades, one AK-47 rifle, 200 cartridges, two magazines and one cellphone.

Through audacious terror strikes on Red Fort in January 2001, the IISc campus, the Ram Janmabhoomi complex in 2005 and the Mumbai attacks, the Lashkar is the not-sohidden hand moving the spectre of terror into India’s soft unprotected underbelly.

The relief activities are a garb and a very effective one that has endeared it to the people. In the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake which devastated PoK, Lashkar volunteers were among the first on the scene pulling out survivors from the rubble and running relief camps. It used not only the outpouring of gratitude but the flood of finance to build itself into the best organised terrorist group within the country.

Today, it is a mini-state within a state that runs like a well-oiled multinational corporation. Its front, the JuD headed by the avuncular red henna-bearded and salwar-wearing Saeed, has nearly 700 offices in most districts of Pakistan. It has an elaborate system of fund collection from Saudi Arabia and domestic sources, raising between Rs 30 crore and Rs 200 crore each year. “In reality, charity has only been a camouflage for the Jamaat’s terrorist factory,” says J&K Police chief Kuldeep Khoda. “The ISI has been using it as a terror instrument to calibrate terror operations in Kashmir and elsewhere in India,” he adds. To bankroll its jihad, the LeT also utilises financiers like Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed Bahaziq who raised funds in Saudi Arabia.

Intelligence debriefings of captured Lashkar operatives including Fahim Arshad Ansari, arrested by the UP Police earlier this year, have given the Indian security establishment an elaborate picture of the camps which trained the LeT. Recruits are drafted by the numerous JuD offices through Pakistan, mainly in Punjab. They are then sent to Baitul Mujahideen where they are meticulously documented—photographed, fingerprinted and given identity cards—to enable both the ISI and the LeT to keep tabs on them and family members. These recruits are then sent to the Maskar-e-Ummalkura training camp located in the thick coniferous forests above Baitul Mujahideen.

Each of these three camps have a few permanent structures where recruits are housed in tents, usually 15 to 20 youth per tent, and at least seven different training programmes are carried out by retired military personnel.

These range from basic courses on weapon handling and firing to advanced courses in espionage and communications. The recruits are fed on a diet of Quranic knowledge, propaganda films like Kashmir jal raha hai and even Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo 3.

Glorification of its cadres killed in Kashmir forms a part of the LeT’s ingenious tactics to maintain a running pipeline of recruits. Whenever a jihadi is killed in Indian territory, the LeT’s clandestine communication network in Kashmir relays the news to master control station in PoK.

Soon thereafter, a ‘ghayabana namaz-e-janaza’ (a funeral prayer in absentia) is organised at the deceased militant’s native place where the JuD and LeT leaders honour his parents and deliver fiery anti-India rants, exhorting the local youth to enrol themselves for the jihad.

Invariably, they end up finding more recruits for their deadly cause. Analysts believe the LeT has a force of over 20,000 fighters within Pakistan and at least 1,000 activists within J&K. Yet, soon after 9/11 the LeT had already begun looking beyond the Valley.

In 2005, Saeed determined the places where graduates of an LeT camp in Pakistan should be sent to fight, and personally organised the infiltration of militants into Iraq during a trip to Saudi Arabia.

That year, he also arranged for an LeT operative to be sent to Europe as LeT’s European fundraising coordinator.

US intelligence began tracking Lashkar-e-Toiba soon after Saeed set up a terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2006 to prepare militants to fight against NATO-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.

FIDAYEEN TRAINING: Only one person from a batch of around 200 volunteers opts to become a suicide attacker who is then given a number of courses to make him physically and mentally tough.

Mumbai police believe that at least 20 other attackers were specially trained by the LeT and could be used in future operations like Mumbai and possibly elsewhere in the world as well.

Fidayeen attackers like the 10 who struck Mumbai were handpicked by the Lashkar brass, who look for qualities like high motivation, fitness and a ruthless streak, and trained separately at a small Lashkar camp in Sialkot. At the training camp, recruits are kept isolated for nearly two months and shown video footage and photographs of their targets and are given detailed briefings of the target areas.

Lashkar has been secretive and selective in inducting its cadres into India, tasking them for specific perform-and-perish operations. Interrogation reports reveal that the recent infiltration of LeT ultras into the Kashmir Valley had been with the Pakistani Army’s knowledge.

After lying low for the past few years, Saeed resurfaced early this year issuing a raft of statements in support of Kashmiri separatist leaders. On August 26, he announced the JuD would launch a countrywide campaign to make people aware of the ‘plight of Kashmiris’.

Not surprisingly, he slammed the Pakistani government for cracking on the JuD-LeT camps in PoK in the wake of the American and Indian pressure after the Mumbai attacks, terming it as “an unwarranted action at the behest of India and the US”.

Lashkar recruitment may have dipped in recent years, as may have its ability to attract motivated cadre. Kasab says he joined the LeT out of economic need rather than religious fervour. But with the flow of recruits still on, India may have to go after the source in Pakistan.

Short of potentially escalatory military options like air and ground strikes against the camps, India has very limited options against the terror outfit. Experts like Ajai Sahni of the Centre for Conflict Studies call for secret action against the LeT camps and leadership inside Pakistan. “Short of covert capabilities and targeted covert options, nothing else will work against them,” says Sahni.

A capability that I.K. Gujral dismantled as prime minister over a decade ago will take over a year to rebuild. Faced with mounting international pressure, Pakistan recently moved against the LeT, arresting Lakhvi but refusing to hand him over to India. These, however, are measures that the Indian intelligence fraternity term ‘window dressing’ designed to buy the Pakistan military and ISI, time and manoeuvering space. The LeT will be the unintentional beneficiary of both.